Our head of sales was our top producer for years, but as we built out a sales team, they failed completely as a people manager. How do we address this player-coach breakdown without losing our best revenue driver?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

This is one of the most common traps in growing businesses. Selling and managing are two fundamentally different skill sets. When you promote your best individual producer to lead a department, you frequently lose your top revenue generator and gain an incompetent manager.

You need to evaluate this leader against GWC™: do they Get it, do they Want it, and do they have the Capacity to do it? Most top producers do not actually want the daily grind of managing people, running reviews, and holding reps accountable. They took the title because they thought it was the only way to advance their career or income.

Pull up your Accountability Chart and separate the seats. Create one seat for Sales Leadership, which requires Leading, Managing, and holding people Accountable (LMA™). Create another distinct seat for Senior Rainmaker or Strategic Accounts, focused purely on hunting, closing enterprise deals, and driving top-line revenue.

Sit down with your leader and have an honest conversation. Acknowledge their exceptional selling performance, address the operational breakdown in team leadership, and present the two distinct seats. Explain that their compensation and standing in the company do not require an executive management title.

If they Get, Want, and have the Capacity for individual rainmaking, move them back into that seat immediately and recruit an operational sales manager to run the team. If their ego refuses to surrender the executive seat despite lacking the capacity for LMA™, you must part ways. Leaving an ineffective manager in place will cause your entire sales force to quit.